Friday Feminism: your body is your body (part 2)

in part 1 of this impromptu series-within-a-series, i talked about the point in a girl's life when she's made to realise she's a girl, one way or another. more than that, she's plopped into a feminine body she never realised she was always going to have, and now she's got to deal with it.

bah! gaaahhhh! blerg! more cartoon sound-effect words! onomatopoeia!

it's a lot more than simply learning the ways of acting feminine, of eschewing the masculine. it's about learning that your body is not quite right because of the way it looks. it's about being shown over and over again the air-brushed bodies and faces of people who are paid to work out for hours at a time, to have people cook steamed chicken and grated radishes for them, and being told you have to look like those bodies.

it's to sell you things, and it's also to keep you in your place. from a purely practical standpoint: how much time do you have to rule the world, change the things, fight the power, if you have to spend all this time in front of the mirror every day looking at yourself and understanding just how miserably you've failed to have skinny enough arms, or symmetrical enough eyebrows? these things we're meant to do, they are a strategic plot!

... they're probably not all out to get us, but really, i do believe there's a little truth to this, and a little history. i recently finished an essay on the representation of women in advertising where i didn't really get to say what i thought, so i thought i'd say it here: our sense of ourselves is manipulated so we never feel quite ok, or complete, but behold! if we buy these things, whether they be a body lotion or a perfume or a pair of particularly jaunty underwear, we will be Better.

the crime of this particular sneaky thing is that it targets teenage girls, who are new to the femininity thing and particularly susceptible to the criticism, implied or otherwise. mean, nasty, sneaking stuff, advertising.

i mentioned rites of passage into femininity last week; another desperately coveted weapon of femininity was Dolly magazine, or Girlfriend. these magazines held the secrets to things, or so i believed. it seemed a bible, or at least a manual of fact and instruction. now, i've never been destined for the type of body idealised by these magazines. imagine though, being so disappointed in yourself for something genetically out of your control. grasping body parts and internally griping at the failure of your thighs to comply with the Rules.

despite being quite a stubborn individual who didn't believe she had to follow the crowd to be happy, i partook in that particular belief, the 'your-body-isn't-good-enough' one, for years, on and off.

there needs to be different messaging. there needs to be some way to get in early with girls and young women to explain to them what 'healthy' actually means, and it's not what magazines tell you it looks like.

'healthy' looks like however it is that you look like when you're happy with yourself. the peace with yourself and the acceptance of who you are, with all those human bits that make you who you are. when you like yourself and appreciate your body, you want to take care of it and keep it happy and shiny. you don't want to starve yourself, or deny yourself different types of food, only to binge-eat way more than you really need because of the power this food group now holds on you because it was forbidden.

you want to do things to keep it running smoothly and powerfully; to keep it strong, to get your blood pumping. when you truly care about yourself, there's no part of you that needs punishing.

that's what we need to teach girls before they learn that other language. before they get the chance to feel that insidious self-hate. this campaign happening in the states is pretty damn cool, and aimed at pre-teens. imagine the revolution that could be started.

i have a stepsister who is 12. she is this clever, artistic and talented 12 year old with whom i had a great chat on our drive home last week, a chat about just being yourself and not feeling like you have to be the same as other girls at your school. i feel for her though, on the cusp of the adult world. i wouldn't change places with her for anything. it's a rocky time anyway, with all your hormones going nuts, to have to deal with negative messaging coming from everywhere.

i hope my future might lay somewhere in this area; in teaching girls self esteem, in teaching them how to decode advertisements so they can see what the media is trying to pull over them. i encourage anyone who has a young woman in the family to have that chat, to talk about women in advertisements and airbrushing and editing, and to get them to look at each and every image and think 'what are they trying to make me feel or think or buy with this picture?'.

my thing at the moment is really, let's just talk about it and see what we say.

that's what Ryan says.

Friday Feminism: your body is your body (part 1)

in some ways, our physical bodies and how we use them in the world is what got me into feminism in the first place. university study finally allowed me to vocalise the separation i have had from my body since i realised i was, and really felt, female. but that's because i'm so much in my head. it's an experience that is common to plenty of people, men and women, and so is not really a realisation 'won' in tertiary education. that's just how it happened for me, the lightbulb moment.

i have a theory which is pretty much a thought i had once that i haven't ever expanded upon directly, but i might have a go at it right here and now, on 'this here blob' as tavi says. my theory is that there is an instance wherein all girls are made to realise their bodies are female, and not just arms and legs. they are very insistently put into the female category in a real way by someone other than themselves. this instance is most often a comment by a family member or a friend of the family, and happens leading up to puberty. it puts them into their female bodies by way of an observation about it, and can often trigger a tricky relationship with body image which so commonly plagues women, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

"You're certainly growing into a young lady, aren't you?"
"Your clothes are getting tight- you must be hitting puberty!"
"Don't you look pretty in that dress"
"It's so nice to see you all dressed up in a skirt for a special occasion"
"You're looking more and more grown up every day"

these aren't even the bad ones; the feeling of freedom among others to comment on a child or young adult's body extends to telling them not to eat so many biscuits at afternoon tea time because they'll get fat, or observing that their thighs wobble when they run. or that they've got a "cute little tummy". yeuck.

my theory is, it starts right here. the innocence of childhood is well and truly shattered by such observations, and so begins a career of bad body image and body shame. not for everyone, sure. but if you're reading this, i encourage you to think back to see if you can remember a comment about your body around this age that made you feel a bit weird.

i cry a little inside thinking of all those rosy-cheeked little girls, chubby thighs or not, who stopped climbing trees and running races against their friends, and started moving more carefully through the world. heavy shoulders of little girls who had to learn about keeping their knees together so the boys couldn't see their underwear. girls who suddenly had to aspire to a grace and passivity they did not instinctively possess; no sudden movements, no clumsy free-limbed rambles. not in public, anyway.

the part of university-styled thought on this subject that still hangs about in my brain is part Foucault, part Butler; we learn to self-regulate and we learn to perform our gendered identity. we understand a way to act that is considered 'correct', but unfortunately (and not accidentally) acting 'feminine' and 'masculine' often takes away the carefree and fluid nature of little people who don't really care about all that stuff. we learn to internalise being watched by society, and start to perform our gender, masculine or feminine, insidious in such a way that we don't even realise it.

as we learn it, there are these milestones of increasing acceptance of norms and forms. it stops upsetting us so much, i think, and starts being something everyone does- i remember it going beyond that for me into the anticipation of partaking in feminine signifiers like spray-on deodorant (anyone else remembering coveting impulse body spray?), and shaving my legs.

you'll notice this particular topic is in parts, and this is part one. i really wanted to get you thinking about your experiences as a young person and the formative moments that made you realise that the way you looked was now the primary material for comment. i have quite a lot to say on this topic; i'm trying to dole it out in bite size bits.

another thing to mull over is how powerful the fear of not fitting in becomes, and then imagine how it might feel to have been born a man in a woman's body, or a woman in a man's.

let's put ourselves in someone else's shoes, and then clomp awkwardly forward.

treasure: some words about bodies with which i concur

"Don't tell thin women to eat a cheeseburger. Don't tell fat women to put down the fork. Don't tell underweight men to bulk up. Don't tell women with facial hair to wax, don't tell uncircumcised men they're gross, don't tell muscular women to go easy on the dead-lift, don't tell dark-skinned women to bleach their vaginas, don't tell black women to relax their hair, don't tell flat-chested women to get breast implants, don't tell "apple-shaped" women what's "flattering," don't tell mothers to hide their stretch marks, and don't tell people whose toes you don't approve of not to wear flip-flops. And so on, etc, etc, in every iteration until the mountains crumble to the sea. Basically, just go ahead and CEASE telling other human beings what they "should" and "shouldn't" do with their bodies unless a) you are their doctor, or b) SOMEBODY GODDAMN ASKED YOU." 

 

Quote credited to Lyndsey, a friend of Jes at The Militant Baker.

 

yes, i know that's not how you spell different.